Society and Language in the Plays of Shakespeare and Jonson - Michael Miller
In this class we will explore Elizabethan and Jacobean theater and its special role in shaping English language and culture by reading works by two of its foremost playwrights, William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Through the late middle ages English society featured social and professional classes which were divided into linguistic parcels of Latin, French, and Anglo-Saxon speakers. Literary audiences were similarly isolated by these divisions. Few literary genres (beyond the sermon)  attempted wider inclusiveness.
The commercial theatrical companies of late sixteenth century London worked under Queen Elizabeth's protection, primarily in open-air public theaters located, along with brothels, bear gardens, and other places of low entertainment, outside the jurisdiction of a hostile city government. They also performed privately at court and in indoor theaters, which attracted a socially more ambitious audience. While many plays were created for the general public, others were written for more exclusive patrons in the upscale indoor theaters within the city, the Inns of Court, universities, or royal and noble households, reflecting the taste, mores and language of each.
Shakespeare and Jonson, the romantic and the classicist, were in many ways opposites, and both exercised a wide-ranging influence on language as well as theatrical taste. While Shakespeare enjoyed immense success during his lifetime, Jonson gained ascendency after his death, and ruled until well into the eighteenth century, when Shakespeare was "rediscovered".
We will study a selection of plays which are especially enlightening, not only as mirrors of society, but as artifacts of the influence of theater on English. We will consider Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, Measure for Measure, Hamlet, and Coriolanus in addition to Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, The Silent Woman, The Alchemist, and Sejanus, in which Shakespeare himself played a major part, when it was first produced by the King's Men in 1603.